When desire dies and you’re both still breathing

...the sex question nobody’s asking

G’day Lee,

Found your website through a mate. Don’t usually do this sort of thing but I’m desperate mate.

Been married 23 years. Two kids, both moved out now. I’m a sparky, run my own business, wife works full time in admin. We’re doing alright money-wise but our sex life is dead. Like completely dead.

She’s going through menopause and I get that’s hard on her. She comes home knackered every night, just wants to watch TV and go to bed. We maybe have sex once a month if I’m lucky and I can tell she’s just doing it to shut me up. Makes me feel like shit to be honest.

I don’t just want sex though, I need to feel close to her. Need to know she still wants me. I try to cuddle on the couch and she’s always “too tired” or “too hot” or whatever. I back off because I don’t want to be that guy who pressures his wife but then I just feel rejected and angry.

Seen some stuff on YouTube about how men have needs and if your wife won’t meet them you’re basically just roommates. Lot of blokes in the comments saying they went elsewhere and kept the marriage going. I’ve been thinking about it. Not proud of it but I’m 51 years old and I can’t live the rest of my life feeling invisible in my own house.

Is that terrible? Should I just suck it up? I love my wife but I’m going mental here. I need touch, I need intimacy, I need to feel wanted by someone. She treats sex like another chore on her to-do list and I feel like a pest for even wanting my own wife.

What do I do?

Peter

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Right then, Peter.

First thing: you’re on a small planet orbiting an insignificant star in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy, hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour whilst rotating at 1,000 miles per hour, and you’re worried about whether you’re allowed to feel lonely.

The answer is yes. You’re absolutely allowed. The universe doesn’t care—it’s too busy exploding stars and creating black holes—but I care, so let’s talk.

Second thing: those YouTube videos are lying to you. Not in a ‘deliberate conspiracy’ way. More in a ‘capitalism discovered it can monetise male confusion’ way. Which, when you think about it, is actually more depressing.

But we’ll get to that. First, let’s address your actual question.

The affair question (or: how to solve loneliness by adding more loneliness)

You’ve asked me if you should outsource your sexual needs whilst keeping your marriage intact.

It’s a bit like asking if you should treat a headache by hitting yourself in the foot. Technically it’s a distraction, but you’ve now got two problems and you’re limping.

The answer is no. But not because affairs are morally wrong in some cosmic absolute sense—the universe is morally neutral and mostly empty, which is either terrifying or liberating depending on whether you’ve had your coffee yet.

No, the answer is no because you can’t solve ‘I feel invisible to the person I love’ by finding someone else to see you. That’s just proving you’re visible in general, which you already knew. You’re not actually translucent. I checked.

What you’re really asking is: ‘Am I allowed to matter?’

And Peter, of course you are. You’re a conscious arrangement of atoms that somehow learned to worry about connection whilst speeding through an infinite void. That’s remarkable. You matter. You’ve just been looking for proof in entirely the wrong galaxy.

Here’s what I heard in your email, underneath all the words: you’re lonely. You’re grieving. You’re watching the person you chose become a stranger, and you’ve got approximately three socially acceptable words for that feeling, and they’re all some variant of ‘I want sex.’

Which is like trying to describe a sunset using only the words ‘bright’ and ‘up.’ You know there’s more happening, you just haven’t got the vocabulary for it because we don’t give men one.

You said it yourself: ‘I don’t just want sex, I need to feel close to her.’

There it is. The real thing. The thing underneath the thing.

You’re not some shallow person who just wants physical satisfaction*. You’re terrified you’re becoming strangers, and sex is the only culturally approved way you’ve been given to check if you still matter to each other.

Spoiler: it’s not working.

*Although, to be fair, wanting sex is also fine. You’re a mammal. Mammals like sex. It’s sort of our whole deal as a species. But that’s not what’s actually going on here.

What she’s not telling you (featuring: the hellfire of menopause)

Now let’s talk about your wife. Because I reckon she’s got her own existential crisis running, and it sounds nothing like yours, which is one of evolution’s more questionable design choices.

Menopause is wild, Peter. And I don’t mean in a fun ‘wild weekend away’ way. I mean in a ‘your entire endocrine system decided to renovate without planning permission, during a heatwave, whilst you’re trying to work’ kind of way.

When she says she’s ‘too hot’ to cuddle, she doesn’t mean she’s being difficult. She means her body has decided that sitting next to another warm mammal is approximately equivalent to being hugged by the surface of the sun. Hot flushes aren’t ‘a bit warm’—they’re spontaneous combustion events. If she could spontaneously combust, she would, just for the momentary relief.

It’s like someone installed a faulty thermostat in her brain and set it to ‘Australian summer’ but forgot she can’t take her skin off.

And desire? Peter, menopause doesn’t just turn down the volume on the stereo. It changes the entire genre of music, possibly to Gregorian chant, and then hides the remote. What used to work might not work anymore. What felt urgent becomes optional. The body that once cooperated now requires negotiation, possibly a manual, definitely patience, and maybe some WD-40.

All whilst society is telling her she should still look 25, perform like she’s 30, and definitely not mention anything as unsexy as vaginal dryness at dinner parties. Because god forbid we acknowledge that female bodies do things after their reproductive usefulness expires*.

*Which is a particularly stupid attitude given that women are one of the few species that lives for decades after menopause, which suggests evolution thinks post-menopausal women are actually quite important. But I digress.

Then there’s work. You said she comes home knackered. That’s not rejection—that’s collapse. That’s ‘I gave everything I had to people who pay me, and there’s nothing left for people I actually love.’

We’ve built a system that demands both of you work full-time just to maintain a mortgage on a house you’re too exhausted to enjoy, then acts shocked—shocked!—when there’s no energy left for wanting each other.

She’s not choosing work over you. She’s surviving an economic system designed by people who apparently never need to sleep or have emotions.

But here’s what I reckon she’s terrified to tell you: she probably feels like she’s failing. Failing at being a wife, failing at being desirable, failing at giving you what you need. She knows you’re unhappy—she can feel it radiating off you like heat off a Queensland road in January. And that makes her want sex even less, because now it’s not just about her exhaustion, it’s about your disappointment.

Performance anxiety is the least aphrodisiac thing ever invented, and that includes the word ‘moist.’

So when you reach for her, what she hears isn’t ‘I love you and want to be close.’ What she hears is ‘you owe me this, you’re not delivering, and you’re failing as a woman.’

And you, hearing her pull away, stop reaching. Which confirms her fear that you only want her for sex. Which makes her pull away more.

It’s a feedback loop designed by a universe with a genuinely terrible sense of humour. Possibly the same sense of humour that invented the platypus and male nipples.

The YouTube problem (or: the algorithm is not your friend)

Right, about those YouTube videos telling you men have needs.

They’re not entirely wrong. Men do have needs. So do women. So do houseplants, that weird fungus behind your shed, and probably rocks, though rocks are notoriously private about their inner lives.

But here’s what they’re not telling you, because it wouldn’t get them clicks: those videos are selling you a very particular story about masculinity that benefits exactly no one except the people making money from your confusion.

The story goes: your worth as a man is tied to sexual conquest. If your wife won’t give you what you need, you’re entitled to get it elsewhere. Real men don’t tolerate rejection. Real men take what they need. Also, buy my course on alpha male dominance for $997.

It’s the same patriarchal nonsense that’s been crushing both men and women for centuries, just repackaged with better production values and a subscribe button.

The comments section—oh Peter, the comments section—is full of people who are either lying, or who’ve successfully maintained marriages alongside affairs, which is a bit like saying you’ve successfully maintained a house whilst there’s a fire in the basement. It might be technically true for now, but the structural integrity is questionable.

Here’s a thought: what if the real problem isn’t your wife’s lack of desire? What if the problem is that you’re both being slowly ground down by a system that treats humans like productivity machines, then expects you to have energy left over for passionate connection?

It’s like running your car on fumes and complaining that the stereo doesn’t work. The stereo’s fine. You’re out of petrol.

You want better sex? Start with better working conditions. Shorter hours. Actual rest. An economy that doesn’t require both of you to work yourselves into dust just to maintain a roof over your heads and maybe, if you’re lucky, a holiday to Queensland once every three years.

I know, I know. ‘Thanks Lee, I’ll just dismantle capitalism before smoko.’

Fair. Let’s get practical before I start talking about seizing the means of production, which is definitely outside my scope of practice.

What you can actually do (a practical guide to not destroying everything)

First: stop thinking about outsourcing.

Seriously. Take that idea, put it in a box, nail the box shut, attach the box to a large rock, and throw the rock off a cliff. Into the ocean. During a storm.

Not because I’m clutching my pearls about infidelity—I’m Australian, we’re not big on pearl-clutching—but because you cannot solve loneliness by adding more secrets to your life. That path leads to exactly one destination: the complete destruction of whatever trust remains in your marriage.

And trust, once properly broken, doesn’t grow back. You can patch it, you can work around it, like those cracks in a windscreen, but you can’t get back what you had. You’ll always see the break lines.

Second: have the real conversation.

Not ‘we need to talk about our sex life.’ God, no. That’s like starting a conversation about depression by announcing ‘WE NEED TO DISCUSS YOUR SEROTONIN LEVELS.’ Technically accurate, but missing the point by several postcode areas.

I mean this: ‘I’m terrified we’re becoming strangers and I don’t know how to reach you anymore.’

Say the true thing. Not ‘I need sex.’ But ‘I feel invisible.’ Not ‘you never want me.’ But ‘I miss you and I don’t know how to show you I love you when you pull away every time I try.’

Then—and this is crucial—shut up and listen.

Don’t defend. Don’t explain. Don’t immediately start solving things, which I know is hard because you’re a tradie and your entire professional identity is built on fixing things. But you cannot rewire a human the same way you rewire a house, though I respect the attempt.

Just listen to what she tells you about her experience. Because I guarantee she’s got her own version of this loneliness, and it probably sounds nothing like yours, which is one of evolution’s more questionable decisions. You’d think conscious beings trying to connect would have similar emotional wiring. But no. We got different everything.

Third: stop treating sex as the only acceptable form of physical intimacy.

You said you need touch and closeness. Right. What if you got that without sex being the destination?

Sit on the couch together. Hold hands whilst you watch something on telly. Give her a foot massage with absolutely no expectation it leads anywhere—and I mean that, Peter. No ‘casual’ thigh touching. No ‘accidentally’ migrating upward. Just foot massage. Feet. That’s it. Revolutionary concept.

Rebuild the physical connection without the pressure of performance. Let her know through your actions that touching her is valuable in itself, not just foreplay to something else.

It’s like rewiring a house—and you’d know about this. You can’t just jump straight to the fancy chandelier. You need to start with making sure the basic circuits work.

Fourth: help her recover some energy.

I know you’re both working full-time, but I’d bet good money—and I’m not a betting man, I’ve seen how the universe handles probability—that if you looked honestly at the household labour, she’s carrying more of the invisible work.

The meal planning. The remembering of birthdays. The noticing when things need doing before they become urgent. The mental load that modern women carry like an invisible backpack full of rocks whilst also working full-time and being told they should be grateful for the opportunity.

What if you took more of that off her plate? Not to earn sex—Christ, don’t turn this into a transaction, that’s grim—but because you love her and you can see she’s drowning.

When she comes home to a clean kitchen and dinner sorted, that’s not going to instantly restore her desire. But it might give her enough breathing room to remember she’s more than just a worker and a household manager. She might remember she’s also a human being with wants, which is the first step to actually wanting anything.

The neurodivergent angle (or: when your brain doesn’t run standard firmware)

Right, quick detour for anyone whose brain didn’t come with the standard operating system, because statistically speaking, there’s a decent chance this applies to one or both of you, and it adds some interesting complications.

If either you or your wife are neurodivergent—ADHD, autistic, or any other flavour of brain that processes the world differently—this whole situation might have some extra layers worth mentioning.

What neurodivergent brains bring to this impasse:

You’re less likely to accept ‘this is just how marriage is’ as an answer. Brilliant. That’s actually your superpower here. You’re more willing to question received wisdom and build something that actually works for you both, rather than what the wedding industry and your parents’ generation told you was normal.

If you’re ADHD, you’re probably excellent at hyperfocusing on solving this once you decide it matters. You’re more willing to try novel solutions. You’re less bound by ‘but this is how it’s always been done.’ You can see possibility where neurotypical brains see fixed rules.

If you’re autistic, you might be better at having direct, honest conversations without all the social performance. You might be more comfortable with the idea of literally negotiating what intimacy looks like, rather than expecting it to magically happen the way rom-coms suggest it should. You can build explicit agreements instead of relying on hints and mind-reading, which frankly should be the default for everyone but somehow isn’t.

What to watch out for:

If you’re ADHD: you might hyperfocus on fixing this RIGHT NOW, IMMEDIATELY, and get frustrated when your wife needs time to process. Your rejection sensitivity dysphoria might make every ‘no’ feel like a catastrophic personal failure rather than just… her being tired on a Tuesday. You might impulse-buy solutions—flowers, chocolates, a weekend away—when what she actually needs is for you to just do the dishes consistently.

If you’re autistic: you might struggle with the ambiguity of this whole situation. You might want clear rules and explicit agreements when what she needs is flexibility and emotional attunement. You might miss the nonverbal cues that she’s touched out or overwhelmed. You might intellectualise intimacy when she needs you to just be present without analysing it.

If either of you are neurodivergent, you might both be dealing with sensory issues that make physical touch complicated. She might be touched out from work, from sensory overload, from a day of masking. You might need physical connection to regulate your nervous system. Neither of these is wrong—but they might be incompatible in the moment, which is just spectacularly bad luck.

The win here? Neurodivergent people are often better at explicit negotiation because we never got the memo about how things are ‘supposed’ to work anyway. Use that. Talk about what you both actually need, not what you think you’re supposed to need according to some arbitrary standard set by neurotypical romance novels.

The question beneath the question (or: why desire isn’t a kitchen appliance)

Here’s what keeps me awake at 3am, when I’m tracking my daily metrics and wondering why humans are so complicated: why do we treat desire like it’s supposed to remain constant across 23 years, despite every single condition of your lives changing?

You’re not the person who married her 23 years ago. You’ve gained weight, lost hair, developed opinions about lawn maintenance. She’s not the woman you met. She’s been through childbirth, career changes, and now her body is staging a hormonal revolution without consulting her about it.

Your bodies have changed. Your circumstances have changed. The kids have left. The entire world has changed. We’ve had multiple recessions, several wars, and the invention of smartphones, which fundamentally altered how humans interact with reality.

Why would we expect desire to remain frozen in time like some sort of emotional museum exhibit?

Maybe the problem isn’t that your desire has mismatched. Maybe it’s that you’re trying to maintain the sexual relationship you had when you were 30, instead of discovering what intimacy looks like for who you actually are now.

That requires curiosity instead of expectation. Exploration instead of performance. Honest conversation instead of silent resentment or secret affairs.

It requires treating each other like actual humans who change and evolve, instead of roles in a script neither of you remembers auditioning for. The script is old. The script is boring. The script was written by people who probably weren’t having good sex either, but they had the decency to not tell us about it.

Some couples at this stage renegotiate entirely. They decide they’d rather be devoted companions than sexual partners, and you know what? That’s fine. Love doesn’t require sex. Commitment doesn’t require desire. You can build a good life with someone without the gymnastics.

Some find that removing the pressure of ‘having to want sex’ actually allows desire to resurface—turns out pressure is the least aphrodisiac thing ever invented, even less sexy than the phrase ‘moist panties’ which I apologise for typing but it proves my point.

Some discover new forms of intimacy that work better for their current bodies and lives. Things they never would have tried at 30 because they were too busy doing it the ‘normal’ way.

And yeah, some couples do open their relationships. But that requires honesty, enthusiastic mutual consent, and a level of communication most monogamous couples never achieve. It’s not a magic fix. It’s not ‘keeping the marriage whilst getting your needs met elsewhere.’ It’s building an entirely different structure that works for both of you. That’s a conversation to have with your wife, not a decision to make in a motel room on the other side of town.

The bottom line (or: what someone who moved to Vietnam to escape his own despair thinks you should do)

So here’s my answer to your question, Peter:

No, you shouldn’t outsource your sexual needs whilst keeping your marriage intact.

Not because I’m clutching pearls about infidelity—I’m fresh out of pearls, they’re expensive and I’m on a Vietnamese pension. But because that’s not actually what you need.

What you need is to feel seen and desired by the person you’ve chosen to build a life with. And you can’t buy that from someone else, no matter how good they are at pretending. It’s like buying a painting of the sunset instead of watching the actual sunset. Technically you’ve got something, but you’ve missed the entire point.

And no, your wife shouldn’t force herself to have sex she doesn’t want. Because desire you have to fake eventually becomes resentment you can’t hide, and resentment is like mould—once it takes hold, it spreads.

What you both need is permission to admit that the current arrangement isn’t working, and courage to build something new together.

That might look like renegotiating what intimacy means. It might look like addressing the work pressures crushing both of you. It might look like accepting that sexual desire has changed and finding other ways to maintain connection—ways that don’t involve genitals but do involve actual presence.

It definitely looks like stopping the performance and starting the honest conversation. The scary one. The one where you’re both vulnerable and neither of you knows how it ends.

Here’s the thing about long marriages: they’re supposed to evolve. The alternative is two people locked in amber, performing a version of intimacy that stopped being real years ago, too scared to admit that what you built together 20 years ago might need renovating. And you’re a tradie—you know what happens to structures that don’t get maintained. They don’t just stay the same. They deteriorate.

You can’t renovate what you won’t acknowledge needs rebuilding.

Start with the truth. Start with ‘I’m scared we’re losing each other.’ Start with ‘I need help figuring out what connection looks like now that everything’s different.’

Start anywhere except with secrecy, outsourcing, or the quiet resignation that this is just how marriage is supposed to be after 23 years.

You said you’re 51 and you can’t live the rest of your life feeling invisible. You’re absolutely right. But the answer isn’t finding someone else to see you—it’s learning how to let your wife see you again, and learning how to see her. Not the her you married. The her she is now.

That’s scarier than an affair, I know. Because it requires admitting how lost you both are, and how much you’ve been hurting each other whilst trying not to. It requires vulnerability without a safety net.

But it’s also the only path that leads somewhere you actually want to go.

You both deserve better than slowly dying of loneliness whilst lying next to each other every night, pretending to watch television you’re not actually watching whilst thinking about how alone you feel.

The universe spent 13.8 billion years creating the conditions for conscious beings to find each other on this small blue rock spinning through an infinite void. The least we can do is use that consciousness to have one honest conversation with the person we love.

Even if it scares the shit out of us.

Especially if it scares the shit out of us.

Because honestly, what else are we here for? To pay mortgages and die? Please. We’re better than that. We’re humans. We invented jazz and Tim Tams. We can figure out how to talk to each other about feeling lonely.

Good luck, Peter. You’re going to need it. But then again, you’ve been married 23 years, so you’re clearly tougher than you think.

References

Brotto, L. A., & Goldmeier, D. (2015). Mindfulness interventions for treating sexual dysfunctions: The gentle science of finding focus in a multitask world. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 12(8), 1687-1689.

Dewitte, M., & Mayer, A. (2018). Exploring the link between daily relationship quality, sexual desire, and sexual activity in couples. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(6), 1675-1686.

Kingsberg, S. A., Krychman, M., Graham, S., Bernick, B., & Mirkin, S. (2017). The Women’s EMPOWER survey: Identifying women’s perceptions on vulvar and vaginal atrophy and its treatment. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 14(3), 413-424.

McNulty, J. K., Wenner, C. A., & Fisher, T. D. (2016). Longitudinal associations among relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and frequency of sex in early marriage. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 45(1), 85-97.

Pascoal, P. M., Narciso, I. D. S. B., & Pereira, N. M. (2014). What is sexual satisfaction? Thematic analysis of lay people’s definitions. Journal of Sex Research, 51(1), 22-30.

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If you liked this…

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